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Invention: Expressive pen

Expressive pen

By Justin Mullins

While the written word has taken great leaps in recent years with the advent of computer-based publishing and the global dissemination of text across the web, the humble pen is more or less the same device it has ever been.

Now the consumer electronics company Philips says it has a breakthrough that could change the way we use pens forever.

What the standard pen does not do so easily, Philips notes, is record the mood of the writer at the moment of writing. So it has developed a pen with sensors in its shaft that detect physiological factors, such as heart beat, blood pressure, skin temperature, and finger pressure.

The pen also has a small actuator that can change the properties of the line that the pen traces out by switching inks and modifying the shape of the writing tip. A built-in chip then determines the writer’s emotional state and changes the colour and quality of the trace accordingly. The result is a pen that produces a continuous record of how the user felt while writing.

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Philips says&colon; “Signatures are currently always the same, yet some documents will be signed with enthusiasm, others possibly with hesitation. Having a recording of this could be useful for historical reasons.”

And if you don’t always want to reveal your true feelings, the company adds that the pen could have a button to switch the effects off. Or you could use a biro.

Self-assembling compound eye

Flies have compound eyes with a unique optical structure that gives them a field of view of up to 90°. In conventional optics, only fisheye lenses have a comparable field of view, but these have a complex arrangement of internal lenses that make them expensive.

Now Luke Lee, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley, US, has developed a way of making tiny compound eye structures that self assemble.

Compound eyes are formed from a large number of honeycomb-like tubes that guide light towards a sensor. Lee first creates a honeycomb pattern of micro-lenses by placing droplets of a polymer onto a sheet and allowing them to form lens shapes under their own surface tension. This sheet of hexagonal lenses is then deformed into a dome shape.

The result is a tiny compound eye structure that Lee says could revolutionise micro-imaging by providing an accurate fly’s-eye view of the world for the first time.

MRI eye tracking

Scientists routinely monitor the way our brains work during various cognitive tasks with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which reveals the brain areas that are working the hardest.

In many of these tests, researchers need to know where a subject is looking, which normally requires the use of eye-tracking equipment that bounces an infrared beam off the eye to determine where it is pointing.

This is expensive, difficult to set up in the narrow confines of an fMRI machine, and also time consuming. So Xiaoping Hu and colleagues at Emory University in Atlanta, US, have developed software that can detect eye orientation using the fMRI scanner alone.

With the subject staring at a calibration target, the software learns to identify the eye orientation from the fMRI data and is then able to work out future eye movements by identifying matching signals in the data.